Capital Markets Outlook 2015: The SEC is conducting a broad review of US equity market structure, but the most important proposals are the tick-size pilot, maker-taker rebates, dark pools, and order routing transparency.

Capital Markets Outlook: With more than a year of SEF trading up and running, swap participants are looking at standardized Market Agreed Upon or "MAC" swap products, to fuel anonymous order book trading next year.

Capital Markets Outlook 2015: Drawing on consumer tech examples like Spotify and Amazon, a new wave of fixed-income trading platforms is determined to help the buy side find liquidity in corporate bonds.

For a number of reasons, major banks haven't seized the opportunity to get involved with bitcoin. Banks like to participate in size, compliance has restrictions, and bosses don't understand it. But these hurdles will be overcome in 2015.

Tradition's SEF Trad-X has seen a sharp increase in trading activity since September for USD interest-rate swaps on its central limit order book, citing its hybrid voice and electronic platform as a differentiator.

Some market professionals thought Apple's 3% price decline last Monday was a flash crash or an algo run wild. Quants at Rosenblatt Securities analyzed the tick data and came up with a different interpretation.

The expansion of platforms for trading exacerbates the challenge of understanding where the true market for an instrument stands and how to execute the trade to achieve the lowest total transaction cost.

The sell side can demonstrate more value by applying analytics to pre- and post-trading, and by educating buy-side clients about broker segmentation, trading behavior and algorithm shortcomings, and more.